Who you know vs. what you know

Back in high school, people told me that in real life, success will be determined more by who you know and less by what you know.

I think that these people have been correct in that success is largely determined by who you know. But they failed to mention that who you know in turn depends on what you know. What you know, what you learn, what you do and how interesting your projects are determines how interesting you are as a person, and whether someone might want to get to know you.

So the moral of the story is: to meet interesting people, do interesting things.

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Small decisions

We normally think that big decisions are what makes the biggest impact on our lives. We thus spend a lot of time deciding where school to go to, which job offer to take, and where to live. These decisions are so-called "big decisions" because they end up affecting a sizeable chunk of our lives for a large period of time in somewhat predictable ways.

Small decisions are rarely thought about. These are decisions like whether to send that email now or in an hour, whether to ask to present your findings in tomorrow's meeting or next week's, and whether you follow up with someone you met last night or put it off.

There's only a small chance that any single small decision would affect much of anything. Most of the time, the email receives no response, the presentation is uneventful, and no useful lead comes up. But because we face these small decisions on a regular basis, sheer number of these events mean that there is still a lot to be gained from being just a little more proactive.

I found that reaching out just a little bit further on a regular basis makes it more likely for those one-off "lucky" events to happen: a blog post goes viral, a grant is received, a new friend gained. In fact many of the wonderful things in my life happened by making a small decision that required being a little bit out of my comfort zone.

So in the end, which school you go to, which job offer you take and where to live might affect your life much less that what you do there, which opportunities you seek and how much you push yourself.

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Reading and Writing

It is quite unfortunate that English teachers are the ones who teach young children about the importance of reading. The only things I ever saw English teachers read were novels, and I found it difficult to believe that reading novels is that important.

Fast forward a couple of years, almost everything I learn is from books, blog posts, or other forms of written media. Reading has been the easiest way to get inside the best minds.

Since I've founded the data visualization startup Polychart, I've been spending a considerable amount of time learning enough business-ish concepts to get by. Books I've recently enjoyed include:

• The Lean Startup by Eric Ries: a book that everyone in the startup world talks about and references. The case studies included are interesting.
• The Personal MBA by Josh Kaufman: a really dense book about many aspects of business; claims to contain all the fundamental principles taught in an MBA program.
• The Art of Profitability by Adrian Slywotzky: thoughts about profitability in an almost novel-like format. It's hard not to read many chapters in one sitting, even though you're not supposed to.
• Ignore Everybody by Hugh MacLeod: fun read but really only learned one thing from it, which is to separate one's work from one's hobby. This goes against the conventional wisdom that you should follow your passions and make it your career.
• Purple Cow by Seth Godin: again a fun read but it seems like the ideas in this book are already well-received enough that they are no longer surprising.
• Don't Just Roll The Dice by Neil Davidson: a short read on software pricing. Page 37 onwards contain a lot of not-so-obvious psychological nuances about how people react to pricing. There is also a free PDF version.

It is also quite amazing how much time I'm spending writing. I spend maybe 10-20% of my time on email, and at least 30% of my time writing. This includes writing things like documentations, blog posts, emails, and other necessary documents.

So if you're still in grade school, don't neglect to practise reading and writing.

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Pure and applied math

I had several questions about my majoring in pure math and applied math. To people not acquainted with the different branches of mathematics, this is the picture they have in mind:

Here, pure math is thought to be the kind of math that has no foreseeable application, and applied math consists of everything else. Fortunately (for me), the actual picture looks more like this:

Applied math is about modelling systems (e.g. physical systems) using calculus and tools derived from calculus. Pure math can be thought of as a combination of two sub-fields: algebra and analysis. Algebra deals with properties of sets objects that can be operated on (i.e. added/subtracted/composed), and analysis provides a rigorous basis for calculus (i.e. a lot of epsilon-delta proofs). Since applied math relies on calculus, analysis is a topic of interest to applied mathematicians as well. Thus pure and applied math intersects. 

A lot of times, we consider other branches of math that are "applied" as their own branches. In that case, the picture looks more like this:

Computer science uses many ideas from pure math, and some computer science theorems and proofs read like theorems and proofs from algebra. Machine learning, a computer science discipline, is really just another name for statistical learning. There are other topics in mathematics, but I don't know about them enough to come up with a full taxonomy.

Moral of the story is: pure math and applied math do intersect. In fact, if you pick any two branches of math, there is probably an overlap.

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SOPA/UBB and NDAA

It's pretty awesome to see ordinary people speak up for the Internet to prevent the passage of SOPA. The whole "black-out" campaigns and boycotts were quite nicely played out. It reminds me of a year ago when telecom companies in Canada tried to introduce Usage Based Billing to charge Canadians more for internet use, and squeeze out independent ISP's. Canadians won in a similar manner: by making their voices heard on the internet.

Yes this is great, but there's something unsettling as well. All this activism to stop the politicians from mingling around with the beloved Internet, and dead silence on NDAA, which allows indefinite detention without trial to be codified into law. Rights and freedoms? Sure, take them! But god help you if you try to charge more for Internet.

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